Told Ya, Told Ya, Told Ya …

Nelson Algren was a terrific novelist who specialized in tales of the underclass. He displayed distinct left-wing tendencies and occasionally did weird things – like moving from Chicago to Paterson, N. J., in his declining years to live out his life in Lou Costello’s home town.
Not Palm Beach, not Honolulu, not Paris or Venice. Uh-uh. Paterson, N. J. Go figure.
His characters, though, often displayed a degree of wisdom that Algren did not. In his 1956 novel, “A Walk on the Wild Side,” he has one of them offer this sage advice: “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”
Apparently, David Patraeus never read that book. And, possibly, another big general John Allen, who’s up for the job of supreme commander of NATO, never read it either. So, now Patraeus, the most celebrated American general in two decades, has resigned as CIA director because he was caught in an extramarital affair with a married mother of two who wrote a book about him, and Allen is under investigation for possibly engaging in an affair with another married mother of two.
Who knew that generals had groupies?
I’m frankly disinterested in who’s having sex with whom unless I’m directly involved. My big problem with Bill Clinton’s conduct was that he’d lied about it under oath at a time when he was the chief law enforcement office of the United States. So, I have no interest in who Patraeus or Allen were or were not fooling around with.
I can, however, understand the government’s concerns with Patraeus playing around at a time when he was the nation’s top spy and if Allen violated the military Code of Conduct and/or the Uniform Code of Military Justice. We’ll have to see how that investigation works out.
What’s intriguing to me, though, is the confusion that these incidents – especially the Patraeus business – has created among the Republicans. Fresh off losing their second national election, a good many GOP politicians in Washington would love a new club with which to beat the Obama administration. The problem is that Patraeus has been viewed as a national hero, especially by Republicans, and nobody seems to have figured out precisely how to beat up on Barack Obama without also beating up on Patraeus.
Moreover, Republican politicians who would like to swing that club are under pressure from other Republican politicians who would like the party to begin to define itself in some meaningful way that goes beyond hysterical hatred of Obama. The pressure to lay off the intense, aggressive partisanship is coming from surprising places, too.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said the other day, “It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that. It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”
Jindal went on to say: “Simply being the anti-Obama party didn’t work. You can’t beat something with nothing. The reality is we have to be a party of solutions and not just bumper-sticker slogans but real detailed policy solutions.”
Less than a week after he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas, Tea Party favorite Ted Cruz of Texas said that the Republican Party has to stop scaring people, especially Hispanics – that it has to become a party that reaches out to people rather than one that’s constantly waging war.
This is, by the way, just the beginning of this stuff. It’s the beginning of a real effort to bring mainstream Republicanism closer to the middle of American political thinking. It’s also recognition that the sheer nastiness of the Republican right – the sort of ingrained anger that’ll probably generate blog comments insulting me personally for saying this rather than dealing with the idea itself – is a huge turnoff to everybody but people on the very edge of American political sentiment.
In other words, what seems to be happening now is that a civil war is breaking out in the Republican Party, just as I’d predicted to you would happen after they lost the election, and that civil war will last for at least four years, until the next presidential election. The same thing took place with the Democrats, if you’ll recall, when Bill Clinton staked out the middle in the 1992 primaries and then moved right to the center after the 1994 midterms.
The reality is that the middle is where the country is – the sensible Republicans a bit to the right of the center and the sensible Democrats a bit to the left of it. Politicians of both parties are so afraid of primary challenges that they hate to admit that, but winning a primary is no good if you can’t win the general election, so the fight is on now among the Republicans.
Permit me to offer a bit of aid and comfort to the Republicans pushing for the right wing to settle down. It’s a quote from the guy who was President when Nelson Algren wrote “A Walk on the Wild Side.” Ike said: “I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.
Eisenhower offered this insightful bit of wisdom, too: “You don’t lead by hitting people over the head. That’s assault, not leadership.